Liberal Arts Services

The Joynes Suite and Joynes Programs

The Joynes Suite

Through the generosity of the estate of Mary Lu Joynes, the Dean's office
of the College of Liberal Arts, and the Division of Housing and Food Service,
space in the Carothers Residence Hall has been remodeled to create the Joynes
Reading Room and two seminar rooms for honors classes. Each seminar room is
approximately 22 by 18 feet, and furnished with tables and moveable chairs.
The elliptical table in the north room was designed and built by Dr. Paul Woodruff,
Daniel Kievlan (Plan II, May 2006) and Matt Valentine (Plan II, May 2000).
The rooms seat 20 people in comfort, and receive some natural light from clerestory
windows opening on the Joynes Reading room.

The Joynes Reading Room is a hub of activity for all the honors programs on
campus. This comfortable library space houses a collection of literature, art,
and films. Thousands of books have been carefully selected to supplement your
learning, and over 300 DVDs are available to watch on one of three projection
screens. Laptop computers are available from the Joynes Room front desk, with
complimentary printing and internet access over our wireless network.

Within the Joynes Room are two smaller seminar rooms, where many honors classes
meet. These are among the best classrooms on campus, with cutting edge technology
and custom-built furniture. When the seminar rooms are not being used by classes,
honors students may reserve them for extracurricular activities, club meetings,
or group study sessions.

All three rooms are wired for both wireless internet access and have live
dataports. Each seminar room is outfitted with a complete media console, including
document cameras and ceiling-mounted projectors. Carothers is on Whitis, south
of Dean Keeton, directly across from the College of Communication.

Joynes Programs

Every month, the Joynes Room hosts a visiting writer. These authors, poets,
artists and scholars give public readings or lectures, and meet with a small
group of students to discuss the craft of writing. Recent visitors have included
finalists for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.

The Joynes Room also offers fellowships to support student writers. These
include a scholarship and sponsorship for participation in book fairs, festivals
and plays.

Map to Carothers (Enter the Joynes Suite through the east doors of Carothers
Residence Dorm; from the Honors Quad. Enter the Quad between Carothers and
Littlefied or Blanton and Littlefield.)

Joynes Literary Society

Dear colleagues, the following message is from Anna Lesa Russo, the new student
leader of the Joynes Literary Society. Please share this information with your
honors students.
-Matt Valentine

Dear Honors Community,

I would personally like to invite each and every one of you to get involved
with the Joynes Literary Society.

The Joynes Literary Society is a student-led organization that brings honors
students and UT's finest professors together to explore worthy texts. Once
a month, 15 students meet in the Joynes Reading Room for a one-to-two-hour
discourse--informal, but inspired--on a chosen text. In the past, Paul Woodruff
hosted a reading of his translation of Electra; John Trimble interpreted
Miller's Death of a Salesman and Elliot's "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" in the light of personal experience; Timothy Moore introduced
us to Kyogen theatre; Carol Mackay contextualized then dissected A Room
of One's Own. You need only query former participants to sense these gatherings
were a rewarding experience.

This year the Joynes Literary Society will also be inviting some of the University's
finest students to lead hearty discussions.

The Joynes Reading Room is kind enough to provide the first 15 students who
sign up for the book discussion with a free or reduced book. The University
Honors Center is also kind enough to provide snacks and refreshments. (September
2007)

Selected Previous Joynes Events:

Joynes Event: Anne Fadiman, author of memoir The Spirit Catches You
and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision
of Two Cultures
February 23, 2009
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the
Salon Book Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National
Magazine Award for Reporting

Anne Fadiman, an award-winning author in residence at Yale University, will
discuss the Hmong refugee community in California and its challenges with the
U.S. medical system in a lecture hosted by the Plan II Honors Program and the
School of Social Work.

Fadiman will discuss the tragic case of one epileptic child who became a casualty
of the cultural battle between her family and the American doctors who were
treating her disease. Participants at the event will include people, many of
them refugees themselves, who provide resettlement, health and mental services
to refugee populations and victims of human trafficking.

Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A
Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, which
won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the Salon
Book Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for current interest
nonfiction and the Boston Book Review Ann Rea Jewell Award for nonfiction.

Fadiman's essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The
New York Times and The Washington Post. While she was a staff writer at Life,
she won a National Magazine Award for Reporting for her reportage on suicide
among the elderly.

Seating is limited. Tickets (free of charge) are available at the student
services desk in the School of Social Work building or at the Joynes Reading
Room front desk in the Carothers Building, room 007.

Joynes Event: Elva Treviño Hart, author of memoir Barefoot
Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
November 17, 2008
Winner of the American Book Award, the Alex Award and the Violet Crown

From Publishers Weekly: "Hart's expressive and remarkably
affecting memoir concerns her childhood as the daughter of Mexican immigrants
who worked as migrant workers to feed their six children. Hart remembers...when
the entire family participated in the backbreaking field labor, driven mercilessly
by Apa (her father), who was determined to eaern enough maney to allow all
his children to graduate from high school. Hart eloquently reveals the harsh
toll that poverty and discrimination took on her family in sharply etched protraits
of Ama, Hart's worn-out mother who clearly loved her daughter but was too exhausted
to show it; of her brother Rudy, who refused to sit at the back of the bus
because he was Mexican; and of her teenage sisters, who struggled to keep their
dignity in the muddy fields. At 17, she drove her father back to Mexico to
visit his family; she recalls how he suddenly changed into a happy man who
felt at home with his land, his language and his people. This is a beautifully
written debut from a writer to watch."

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review: This autobiography
by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch
Out For, deals with
her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and
proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to
teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup
on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored
gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine
himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication
that Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas
when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired
husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality.
His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance
of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably
a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic
desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson
at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a ''still life with children''
that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become
its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy
to put down. (June) "

In his nonfiction, Mr. Lopez writes often
about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. In
his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.
He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book
Award, Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist for which he received
the John Burroughs and Christopher medals, and eight works of fiction, including
Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. His essays are
collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life.

He contributes regularly to Granta, The Georgia Review, Orion, Outside, The
Paris Review, Manoa and other publications in the United States and abroad.
His work appears in dozens of anthologies, including Best American Essays,
Best Spiritual Writing, and collections from National Geographic, Outside,
The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and other periodicals.

Informal gathering, Yale Professor Wai Chee Dimock
April 10, 2007
Through Other Continents is a reexamination of American literature through
the lens of world history and global culture. This is a critically acclaimed
book by a renowned scholar. Honors Students are invited

March 22, 2007
Mary Karr
Karr will read from recent works. Karr's first memoir, The Liars' Club, won
the PEN Martha Albrand Award for best first nonfiction and was a finalist for
The National Book Critics Circle Award. It was on The New York Times bestseller
list for more than a year and a "best book" for more than thirty
newspapers and magazines. The sequel, Cherry, about her adolescence, was
also a bestseller for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San
Francisco Chronicle, and The Houston Chronicle. It was a "best book" for
those periodicals and The New Yorker, where it was excerpted. Karr's two
memoirs are credited with sparking the explosion in that genre.

Karr's grants include The Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting
Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. Her work appears in such magazines as The New
Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and Parnassus. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck
Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She contributes
to magazines such as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly.

November 30, 2006
Joynes Events: Barbara Ras
Award-Winning Poet
Her first book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, was chosen by C.K. Williams to
receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award and subsequently won the Georgia Author
of the Year Award for poetry. Her work has appared in many magazines and
anthologies, including Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner,
and American Scholar. She has received the Ascher Montandon Award, the Kate
Tufts Discovery Award, and honors from the National Writers Union, Villa
Montalvo, San Jose Poetry Center, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others.
She has traveled extensively in Latin America and lived for periods of time
in Colombia and Costa Rica, and in 1994 she edited a collection of Costa
Rican fiction in translation entitled Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion.
She is currently Director of the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.
Her new book, One Hidden Stuff, is forthcoming from Penguin.

November 2, 2006
Lawrence Wright
Author and Magazine Journalist: Lawrence Wright
Best-selling author and magazine
journalist Lawrence Wright discusses his new book on Al-Qaeda.
Wright has published six books. City Children, Country Summer (Scribner's,
1979), In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 - 1984 (Knopf, 1988),
Saints and Sinners (Knopf, 1993), Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994), Twins: Genes,
Environment, and the Mystery of Identity (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997; Wiley
and Sons, 1998), and God's Favorite (Simon and Schuster, 2000).

His history of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, will be published by Knopf in
August. A portion of that book, "The Man Behind Bin Laden," was published
in The New Yorker and won the 2002 Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Award
for best magazine reporting. He has also won the National Magazine Award for
Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine
Journalism.

Wright is the co- writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege, starring
Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, which appeared in November
1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite,
directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April
2000. Currently he is working on a script for MGM about John O'Neill, the former
head of the FBI's office of counterterrorism in New York, who died on 9/11.
Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.